


a lullabye to close your eyes

by Anonymous



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Body Horror, Comes Back Wrong, F/M, Gen, Incestuous Undertones, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:35:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29520267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: When she glances back Jeremy is still smiling. It looks a little funny, she thinks, but maybe she’s not an expert anymore.(Archive 2015)
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Jeremy Gilbert
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: Anonymous Fics





	a lullabye to close your eyes

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Halloween comment ficathon, 'Jeremy comes back wrong' .

They tell her something’s wrong with him.

She won’t hear it. Of course there’s something wrong with him. He _died_. It’s nothing they can’t fix. At night she sits outside his door and listens to his breathing, soft and even, sometimes stilling, sometimes going laboured.

It always resumes. Elena puts her head to the cool wood of his door and waits, patient and full of faith, until it rushes in to fill his lungs again. She isn’t interested in the gaps. She’s interested in the next gasp, the place where he returns to her all over again.

In the morning Jeremy lifts a cup of coffee, frowns, sets it down. He picks at bacon, pancakes, the way he picked at takeout last night. His eyes track the movement of light across the floor.

Elena takes the dishes out of his hands. “Not hungry?” she asks. Her voice is a too-bright chirp.

Jeremy looked up at her and smiles. His eyes look hollow, but once his sleep gets better that’ll clear up. “Nah,” he says, clears his throat. “So, I need to go and see Mr. Saltzman about making up for the time I missed over the summer.”

His tone is teasing over _Mr. Saltzman_. Gotta ask our friend Alaric to flex his authority for us. It might be a little off, sound strange in the back of his mouth, vowels flattened over his tongue. It’s okay. Nothing’s as easy as all that, and getting Jeremy back was smooth and kind. They have to stumble here and there.

Elena puts his dishes in the dishwasher, kisses his forehead and gets a familiar wrinkle of his nose as her younger brother stands, removing his head from easy reach. “I’ll drive you,” she says.

“I can drive,” he says, but the objection is token. She swats his shoulder and he grins at her. White teeth, pale gums, his hand landing on her arm. Elena pauses, startled, and he folds her into a cool hug that somehow still smells like the grave dirt she brushed away from his face. _It’s just your imagination_ , she tells herself. Hugs him back a little too tight, vampire-strong, and has to remind herself to rein it in because he doesn’t protest.

“See you in the car,” she says.

He touches her hair as he lets her go, and his eyes are hollows in his face. But he assumes a smile when he sees her watching. “Gimme five minutes.”

His sneakers thump the stairs. Elena closes her hand around her keys, pressing the metal ridges into her palm until they bite. Then she goes outside, letting the red marks in her immortal palm fade.

The sun glazes the pavement and her hair, baking her upper arms. Elena fingers her ring, watches not the high schoolers but the bus drivers, a couple parents picking up their kids, the adults driving past. Blood pumps and moves beneath warm skin, seamed and freckled and touchable. No one here would be easy to corner; it makes the watching harmless, she’s sure. A dad hanging out the door of his SUV, squinting at a girl dragging a wheeled backpack as she rolls her eyes. His tie is loose around his neck. He wouldn’t be able to fight; she’s shorter and smaller and stronger than he is.

She’d take the arm currently shading his eyes and pin it - twist it if she had to, shooting pain up his shoulder, so his eyes flew wide and she could catch his gaze. So that his heartbeat spiked until she could almost taste his blood in her mouth. She’d catch his mind, lull him still, bend his head - 

“Are you hunting?”

Elena whips around. Jeremy is standing behind her, head cocked to the side, smiling curiously as he observes her. She feels the blood rush to her face and a tremor go through her hands, a stammer budding on her lips. “Jeremy - “

A sense of puzzled wrongness creeps through her as she looks at his face. There’s no censure there, no struggle. His face is almost too empty of it - a clean, blank slate.

“No,” Elena says. “I wasn’t.”

Jeremy smiles at her curiously, one eyebrow lifting.

Elena has never found it - impossible to lie to him before. He’s her little brother. She wants the edges of his world smoothed away and clean. But when he smiles at her like this and just waits, the quality of the silence pooling and stretching patiently, she finds herself too eager to fill it.

“Someone would notice,” she explains. “There’s too many people around here. Way easier to find a less crowded spot to hunt.”

“High schoolers not to your taste anymore?”

Elena stares at him, at the mouth his teasing tone came out of. His jacket lies along slumped shoulders, half zipped. He looks like her brother. His voice is her brother's. Even his smile is her brother's, oddly awkward along the thick curve of his mouth. But for a split second his eyes - 

“I,” she says, embarrassed, “how did you - “

“Come on, Elena.” He rolls his eyes, and the movement is so familiar that it’s doubly out of place. “You’re being kind of obvious. Soccer dad over there isn’t _that_ interesting. You could probably do better.”

Her embarrassment is surreal. “ _Okay_ , sorry. Jeez. Quit being a brat.”

Jeremy shoulders his backpack, shrugs carelessly. “You don’t have to be sorry. We have to get used to it sooner or later.”

Elena eyes him, uncertain, but his voice sounds sincere. “Sure,” she says, falls in step beside him. “Ric get everything cleared up?”

They walk side by side, his arm almost brushing hers. The tree branches shake above them, and Jeremy pulls an orange leaf out of her hair and laughs at the face she makes. “Yeah, it’s all cleared up. Got my workload and my paperwork in one fell swoop.” He thumps an elbow back against his full pack. “When fall comes around, it’ll be like I never died.”

Elena tightens her lips.

He snorts at her. “What, I’m not even supposed to say it now?”

Elena looks away. “No, I’m sorry.” He’s the one who died. He should be able to cope with it however he needs to.

When she glances back Jeremy is still smiling. It looks a little funny, she thinks, but maybe she’s not an expert anymore.

His hair flops in front of his eyes. In a conscious reach for normality Elena turns, still walking, and swipes at it. She lets the heel of her palm affectionately thump his brow. “Come on,” she says. Her voice stutters a little when he catches her hand, holds it. Should his skin be cool like this? It’s harder for her to judge these days. “Let’s get to the car. We can eat out tonight to celebrate.”

“I’d rather eat in,” he says, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “We can pick up pizza?”

It twinges in her chest, but it’s an old twinge. A memory of Jeremy wheedling at her with a sideways grin when their parents were out, Elena pretending to hold out before she took the phone and dialed them a pizza. Back when they were better at being brother and sister, instead of orphans at odds.

“Pizza sounds good,” she agrees, digging in her pocket for the car keys.

He lets go of her hand reluctantly. Her skin feels cold without him grasping her, so his touch can’t have been that cool. She’d forgotten they were still holding onto each other.

Three days later the neighbors dog goes missing.

Elena sees them stapling up posters when she goes out for groceries. She doesn’t need many groceries these days, rarely has an appetite, but she goes to make an appearance and tells anyone who asks that she goes to the expensive health food store across town for anything else. And more people ask than you’d think, making what they consider to be casual conversation.

They remember her shopping with Jenna or Jeremy when it wasn’t Jenna picking up takeout or packaged salads. Rough-housing in the chips aisle, picking out orange juice, bickering over what flavours of ice cream to get. Jenna called parental authority when she was there, Elena and Jeremy sniping between ‘I’m older’ and ‘I’m taller.’ The perils of a little brother who topped you by a head.

Elena realizes she’s smiling in the checkout line. For once, she isn’t so startled that she stops. She has Jeremy again - she gets to be grateful for that. She _should_ be grateful for that. She doesn’t want to risk anything taking him back.

It becomes a little more real when the tall, round-faced girl from four houses down confronts Elena directly as she drives past their driveway. She pushes a flyer through the window and Elena sees the little sad pinch to her eyes, red where she’s been crying. She takes the paper and stares at it, remembering the golden retriever from a distance.

“I’ll keep an eye out,” she promises her. The teenager nods. Casey. That’s her name. Elena presses gently on the gas and turns the paper face down on the seat.

She tells Jeremy over dinner. He listens, chopsticks poised over his white paper container, and Elena makes a note to check how much the level of food inside has actually lowered. His face is blank. It shows no shock, no concern.

“That’s too bad,” he says perfunctorily, pulling a piece of broccoli out. “That dog was kind of obnoxious, though.”

Elena looks sharply at him. “Come on,” she says. Why is she so uneasy. “It probably got hit by a car. Be a little more sensitive.”

He laughs and nods and Elena finds herself smiling, face creasing back at him instead of explaining she was serious.

She’s just so glad to have him back.

She waits until she hears him finish brushing his teeth, hears his door close, and then she rises smoothly and goes on silent bare feet to the door.

When she pushes it open she receives a nasty shock. Jeremy stands in the hall outside, inches away in a black shirt that shadows his skin out to grey by the dim lamplight still glowing downstairs. His eyes look like holes in his head, and Elena wants to grab him. A surge of fear goes through her like lightning. She has to keep him here. Keep him with her.

“Jer,” she gasps.

“You know, you could just come in,” he says casually. There’s an eyeroll in his tone. “You don’t have to sit outside in the hall like a stalker.”

Elena stares at him, embarrassed and puzzled all at once. Jeremy, Jeremy is making an offer like this? Jeremy hates when she fusses over him, and Jeremy has never...never been that comfortable with her vampirism. Not in the short time they had. She can summon up the exact face he would have made, had he learned she was crouched outside his door counting his breaths, before he….

She smooths her palms across her skirt and forces an awkward laugh out of her mouth, but it withers under his patient stare. “I,” she says. “Sorry, I know it’s weird, I just - “

“Be less weird without you hunched at my door,” he interrupts. He turns on his heel and goes into his room. He crawls into bed, sloppily tucking the covers up, and closes his eyes as he lays his head back on the pillow.

She almost closes her door, her face burning. But she lingers too long, fingers digging into the painted wood of her doorframe, and she sees - tendons standing out in his neck, his fingers held too still on the blanket.

Elena takes a step forward, tugged as if by a magnet.

She thinks about Jeremy, lying in bed alone trying to sleep. She thinks about the dreams that plague him. Maybe having died changes you, she acknowledges, forcing her mind into a direct confrontation, but maybe he’s _asking_ her to help, like this.

Elena crosses the hall. She pushes his door mostly shut and settles in his desk chair, pulling up her legs.

In the dark, she can see that he cracks his eyes open and finds her in the dark. His neck relaxes slowly, and his hands curl into softer fists against his blanket.

“You’re gonna get a crick in your neck,” he says.

“Shh,” Elena says softly. “Curfew’s in effect.”

He snorts involuntarily, turning his head to muffle it into the pillow like there’s still an adult down the hall to worry about. “Good night, Elena,” he says. His voice is already softening with sleep.

“Good night, Jer,” she whispers.

His breathing smoothes out.

Elena doesn’t sleep.

Sometime in the small sharp hours of the morning his breath hitches and strangles off. Her body processes it before her mind does. She’s out of the chair and beside his bed before she can think.

“Jer,” she says. She presses the back of her fingers to his cheek. No, no, no, he’s so _cold_. She lies down on top of his covers, pressing her hand to his chest, finding a sluggish beat. “Jer,” she sobs. Presses her forehead to his. He always comes back. His breath always starts again. She breathes her blood-hot exhales frantically over his mouth, his still mouth and sunken eyes. He smells like his shampoo but not of human sweat and skin.

She stays pressed against him until, slowly, the hollow weight of his chest begins to rise again. Then, and only then, does she begin to cry for the first time since he was resurrected.

He doesn’t wake up while her tears dampen his shirt and soak his pillow, and Elena doesn’t leave the bed. She keeps one hand on his ribs, offering him twice-borrowed body heat, and she curls against him even when his elbow pins her long hair and twinges her scalp.

His heartbeat has steadied, and his breathing doesn’t fade again.

They fall asleep together, Elena for the first time in a week.

Elena has been avoiding most other people. She and Jeremy need their time alone to be safe. To recover. But when Stefan and Damon show up on her doorstep one day, she holds the door resignedly open. She knows the look on their faces. It’s an expression that portents doom.

They tell her someone bad has shown up. Someone with a grudge woven into their family lineage and the blood in the ground of Mystic Falls. Elena cradles her coffee cup, listening, and wonders if she and Jeremy should leave.

She thinks about it more seriously than she ever has before. And it doesn’t help that Jeremy wanders into the room, listening to the warning spiel, and Damon and Stefan both tense subtly and exchange puzzled looks.

Later, she mentions it to Jeremy as they throw together chips and dip for a lazy dinner in front of the TV.

“Well, let’s finish this year of school,” Jeremy says. She’d pictured two reactions; one a total rejection, one an enthusiastic acceptance. This thoughtful ambivalence throws her off somehow, though she doesn’t know why.

Elena drops a handful of potato chips into a plastic bowl, listening to the dry clatter and rustle. “You wouldn’t mind?”

Jeremy shrugs, his shoulder stretching and relaxing under the soft, worn fabric of his grey T-shirt. “It sounds like you think it would be a good idea.”

Elena swallows. “Right,” she says wryly. “Because my decision making process has been impeccable so far.”

“Well,” Jeremy says, and the twitch of his mouth is a little mean. “I’m on vervaine, so that clears up a few things.”

She winces, but she deserved that. He elbows her when she stays silent.

“Elena. Come on. Like Mystic Falls has done us any favours.”

No, she supposes Jeremy hasn’t clung quite so hard to the trappings of their old dead ‘normal.’ She swallows hard. “If you were...alone, would you go?”

“Elena, if I were alone, I would be long gone.” He caps the dip bottle and tosses it back into the refridgerator while she stares at him. Relief suffuses her. She doesn’t examine anything else. “But now that I’ve gone through all that stupid paperwork,” he adds, and she grins.

“Okay,:” she says. No, this is - this is a good plan. It’s a good plan to go, and Jeremy just doesn’t want to abandon all the work he’s done so far. They’ll finish out the school year, pack up the house. Hit the road, just the two of them, free.

“Besides,” he adds. “No one notices missing people in Mystic Falls anymore.”

Her train of thought grinds to a halt. Elena stares at him. “Jeremy, I don’t want you talking like that,” she says, stunned.

He glances up, unconcerned, and sees something in her face. “Okay, _mom_ ,” he says dryly. “Just gallows humour.”

Elena nods and tries to smile, briefly embarrassed by her outburst. Connor’s voice rings in her skull. _The biggest monster he’ll ever see…_

Jeremy kisses her forehead, brief and rough, and bounds off to the living room.

It’s just, it didn’t sound like a joke. It sounded like her little brother has been casually thinking their future like they’re just going to go on killing people, inevitably. Elena rubs her arms as a chill crawls over her whole body.

They just need to wait. He just needs to get better. He’ll feel better once life is back to normal, or what passes for normal. He’ll feel better if they get out of this town. He’ll feel better eventually. She’ll make sure of it.

She has to. She can’t, can’t, can’t lose him again.

Their new enemy takes Jeremy.

Elena barely realizes she’s screaming, her voice a raw scrap of fury in her throat, until Stefan interposes himself between her rage and Damon. Caroline is standing in the corner, white-faced and stunned. Bonnie is sleeping, worn out from the work she’s been doing to find them.

There’s a red hot coal inside of her ribcage. It’s charring her from the inside out and if she stands still for one more second she will unravel. Her bones and muscles and skin will unpeel just to get away from it. She’ll fall apart into ribbons of terror and grief and she can’t do that, she can’t, because Jeremy needs her.

This time, she can do something.

She doesn’t even make it to confronting them before they vervaine her. They do it almost outside the Grill, hustling her into a car. Just out of eyeline, not that people in Mystic Falls call the police much. She leaves dents in the car door and one of them has to pin it shut on the drive back, but it doesn’t help her.

She’s still not strong enough to help herself, or save her baby brother.

Elena lets herself sleep in the grasp of the poison. She has to conserve her strength.

She doesn’t want to stay awake with nothing but the fear to occupy her.

The guy is inconsequential. He has burning eyes and blood soaked sigils in his basement, tattoos on his arms that slither. They’re pawns for him, scraps of flesh he thinks he can leverage a little more fear with. He’s using Jeremy for nothing. Elena has stakes through her arms, truncating her attempt to crawl to her brother, and she just wants to howl.

She doesn’t howl when he fires a shotgun down into Jeremy’s chest. She’s silent. The world greys out at the edge like she’s still alive enough to faint from lack of air.

Jeremy jerks and slumps against the concrete. Blood pools against the floor, trickles out of the corner of his mouth. His head falls to the side, muscles in his neck loosening, and his face is slack. His eyes stare. His blood creeps into the cracks on the floor. Sick hunger twists in her stomach, and that’s when Elena starts to scream.

He gets tired of that real quick. He hammers a kick into her stomach, breaking ribs, and she coughs convulsively, stabbed with icy shards of pain, her arms jerking against the rough wood impaling them. Soon she’ll feel very far away from her body. She’s known trauma well enough to see it coming, rushing like a train on a track, to welcome it with open arms.

On the floor opposite her, chains clank and slither. Elena doesn’t open her eyes to watch him kick her brother’s body, too.

The world is hollow and yawning, and her fingers twitch against the concrete, but it’s her torso she presses into the gritty floor, feeling the dull movement of blood through her veins, the clench of her heart and organs, everything that should be stopping with her little brother’s but mercilessly continue.

“Come on, you’re not dead yet,” the man says breathlessly. He shoves the shotgun’s muzzle into her ribs and Elena finds another breathless scream in her, as if it matters. “ _We’re_ not done yet.”

She opens her eyes to look at him and sees her little brother, grey-skinned and slack jawed, rise up behind him.

Jeremy grips the man’s shoulder and turns him. When the man sees him he’s choked but not entirely frozen, so Jeremy has to take the shotgun away from him and break it in half.

The man jerks his hands up, light bending eerily around his fingers. Elena rips her arms free of the stakes.

She can’t hold him with her hands, because they won’t obey her - too much damaged, not enough time to grow back - but she can clutch him in her arms. She yanks him backward and tears into his neck, hot blood gouting over her chin and chest, and she drops him before she’s had half her fill.

Jeremy smiles at her, even though his jaw isn’t working quite right. He reaches out for her and Elena reaches out for him. She leaves bloody handprints on his cheeks, presses them body to body. His heart isn’t beating. She can’t feel his heart. She can’t hear his heart. It doesn’t matter.

She presses a sobbing kiss to the corner of his mouth and he turns his head, stiffly, and licks at her chin.

And then Elena understands.

She doesn’t need to understand much. She just needs her mind to work enough to grasp this concept. And it does. She understands how, when she pushes her gore soaked fingers into his mouth, his eyes roll back and he sucks clumsily at them. She takes his hand and they kneel, together, beside the still-twitching body.

And when Jeremy bends down, his hands digging into the body cavity and greedily opening it, Elena pets the back of his neck. She puts her face against his back, between his shoulder blades as his muscles work and flex, and she cries but in relief.

Jeremy is with her, and Jeremy is staying with her. Nothing can take him away, least of all death.

She holds his head, cradles his neck, whispers, “shh. I’m here. Shhh.”

When he lifts his head, Jeremy isn’t crying. He’s smiling, and his cheeks are flushed and living, and the salt of her tears cleans away the copper in her mouth.

They don’t wait to finish the school year.


End file.
